• fxomt
    3•20 hours ago

    I (personally ofc) think that goes against the spirit of the fediverse. See lemmy.world for example; anyone can argue that lemmy.world is good for the fediverse since it’s an easy choice for beginners to make, but in the long term it will harm everyone in general, since it just becomes centralized.

    I think it makes sense that lemmy and mastodon are the most popular but i don’t think it would hurt to have alternatives. I know that it’s different when it’s about an instance instead of a software (since the developers don’t have much say in running the instances in general) but it could still harm smaller projects.

    If we’re talking about feature, wouldn’t it be better to improve on the existing?

    I’m not saying lemmy shouldn’t be improved, but i was highlighting that it can be frustrating to wait for the lemmy devs to implement features that other software have implemented long time ago, and it may discourage other small devs from implementing it since “the most popular software doesn’t implement it, so no one would see/use this feature anyway”.

    • @[email protected]
      3•18 hours ago

      Keeping the verse alive one way or another goes with the spirit of fediverse. The case with .world does highlight the pitfalls of having an instance so big, but it highlight its success. The pitfalls can also be mitigated by having many other instances, big and small (e.g. sh.itjust.works, blahaj, db0, sopuli, lemm.ee, all the feddit instances) that although they have different names, they share the same banner of Lemmy. This is highly successful with Mastodon.

      Speaking of the same banner, wouldn’t it be great to have many different link aggregators like lemmy, mbin, piefed, and maybe others to share the same class identity or so instead of what they currently are? This way, they all won’t be treated like competing standards despite being on their own code base and feature set. Maybe with this, forks of the original Lemmy code can be created to address the stuborness of the devs.

      Yes, I am aware ActivityPub is supposed to achieve just this, but it also does a lot of things that are not relevant and even confusing to the specific use case (e.g. link aggregator). Also, newcomers would just get frustrated with all this tech stuff and ran off to the warm embrace of big tech.

      • fxomt
        2•18 hours ago

        I agree. Though my main concern was that Lemmy would gain too much control over the threads part of the fediverse it doesn’t seem to have happened yet. Its mainly a future concern for me.

        There’s nothing wrong with Lemmy or mastodon, but it’s nice JIC to have good alternatives like mbin n piefed.

        I’ve been thinking of making a project that would explain the entire fediverse (hopefully easily) and build a chooser, where it’d help by choosing a software and an instance. That is a good way to cull back a little on too much centralization IMO.

        Don’t get me wrong though, Lemmy or mastodon, I’m still happy that we’re getting more mainstream :D ultimately my points are just small criticisms.